Russia blocks Premier League broadcasts by Amazon's Twitch over lawsuit | Hacker News Reader

Russia blocks Premier League broadcasts by Amazon's Twitch over lawsuit

reuters.com

63 pointsomgtehlion42 comments

> According to the information of the newspaper Kommersant, Rambler Group demands through the court to “stop the spread of pirated broadcasts” and to recover a record 180 billion rubles. (about $ 2.9 billion) from the world's largest streaming service Twitch. Yulianna Tabastaeva, a representative of Twitch in court, announced that the requirements of the Rambler Group, in addition to paying compensation, also include a complete blocking of the Twitch service for users in Russia.

We are fully into the state/corporate/mafia extortion and authoritarian phase of the internet and technology.

I miss the old internet that was anti-authoritarian and still growing creating value.

The internet and technology around it has peaked, value creation phases nearly complete, value extraction phase underway.

Next step a breakup of the worldwide united internet union and more value extraction along borders and corporate tribes requiring bribes.

This is not about 'authoritarian control' whatever that might mean, it's "just" about copyright enforcement - specifically, media rights over English Premier League matches, of all things. Claims that some comparatively-trivial copyright violation accounts for "billions of dollars" in economic impact are nothing new.

> This is not about 'authoritarian control' whatever that might mean, it's "just" about copyright enforcement

It is in Russia, it's more like an excuse to block Twitch. Sberbank, the parent company of Rambler, is also a Kremlin's right hand and has been doing this kind of stuff since forever. For example, this was the company to which Yandex was forced to sell the controlling "golden share".

This seems like a common knee-jerk reaction lately - if something comes out of Russia, it must be the government doing its authoritarian stuff. But you are reading it backwards. Russian government doesn't need any "excuse" to block something - if they want to, they just go ahead and do it. Instead, it is rambler that is using its connections to government as a credible threat to extort bigger settlement.

> Sberbank, the parent company of Rambler

Sberbank is not the parent company of rambler, they have recently bought 46.5%.

Sberbank is also behind recent Nginx extortion raids.

Any proof?

Why would the Moscow want to prevent gaming fans from seeing their countrymen do well in fortnight or whatever? What's so suspicious about greedy actions by a company working for a corrupt regime that you suspect an ulterior motive?

Russian government more than once voiced concerns over gamers doing things online without government involvement and control. Sberbank is not just greedy business, it's greedy only when it serves Kremlin.

It's possible but, applying Occam's razor, it's not super uncommon these days to have IP holders manage to censor websites. Given the amount of money involved in those broadcasting licenses I can definitely imagine that they would seek to block twitch pirates heavy-handedly, with or without Kremlin support.

"It is in Russia, it's more like an excuse to block Twitch"

Any proof?

Yeah, I try to give them the benefit of the doubt, after all reddit was pretty quick in getting rid of /r/soccestreams as soon as the PL people got on their backs, it looks like Twitch is in the same position. It so happens that in this case the people forcing them to fall into line and respect copyright law are close buddies with some bad people in Russia, but nobody is perfect. After all the money for those players' Lamborghinis [1] has to come from somewhere.

[1] https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/sport/football/wayne...

This particular case is mostly corporate but also authoritarian. It presses and seeds the point that Russia wants their own internet and there be these type of deals having to be made to access it. [1]

China already does this type of "business", controlling their markets.

The internet is also regularly shut down by authoritarians in their respective states. We are definitely in the authoritarian phase of the internet. As the internet took over markets, politics and more, it was inevitable.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-05/vladimir-...

It is quite normal that organisations that have purchased the sole rights to sports broadcasting (an ordinary process in just about every country in the world) aggressively pursue alleged violators of their rights[0]. Domains being used to serve "pirate media" being blocked in various countries is also a norm[1]. There's nothing particularly special about this case aside from the media being interested because they can put Russia in a headline.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/oct/30/music-sport...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_blocking_access_to_T...

> Russia wants their own internet

As opposed to America's internet, whose corporations and governments have routinely been taking down whatever shit they wanted to take down, for decades?

If you'd bought the rights to rebroadcast an incredibly popular series of sporting events, and no-one was subscribing because they were watching the stuff online for free, what would you do about it?

I don't approve of extorting all of Twitch for one companies corporate copyrights including blocking Twitch across an entire country. This is a scorched earth corporate authoritarian/oligopoly approach.

Not a fan of these types of blanket Moltov cocktail extortions that affect 99% of all people using the service normally.

Also, it strangely targets a property of a large American company that they do not like in Amazon. This is opening up for more of this only. Probably the beginning of fully blocking streaming on foreign sites as there is lots of money in it now. Basically the China market control approach that helps again with the authoritarianism.

There is copyright / pirating all over the internet in every country. Would you approve of shutting it all down because someone is leeching?

Ultimately people that watch streams / pirate means that the original product is either badly priced, inaccessible or the user can't afford it anyways. Most people that can afford these things will pay eventually. There have been studies on piracy being mostly people that would never pay at that time. Further, in the end pirates turn into people that buy more content [1]. Easily accessible products that are easier than piracy use the market to reduce it. [2] Tuning products to stop a small percentage of users will lead us to tyranny of markets and horrible product experiences for paying customers which will then either pirate [3] or tune out.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evkmz7/study-again-shows-...

[2]https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/02/26/2233257/studies-keep...

[3] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/piracy-is-back.html

> I don't approve of extorting all of Twitch for one companies corporate copyrights including blocking Twitch across an entire country. This is a scorched earth corporate authoritarian/oligopoly approach.

I'm not saying that I condone what's happening right here, but if the nationalities were flipped Twitch would've had their domain taken away world-wide and have to play a game of domain whack-o-mole like libgen currently does.

Agreed, these types of authoritarian / corporate oligopoly moves on the internet are bad in any direction. China is already gone. Hopefully everyone else can get along but it isn't looking good.

In the real world this would be the equivalent of a corporate dispute or state dispute that would shut off entire cities, states or countries because one business within it is problematic. These are massive overreactions that probably hint to some baby steps to larger moves such as dividing the internet and competing internets.

I can guarantee you the engineers and product people aren't calling the shots on this one. It is oligopoly level business and authoritarian state leaders.

> In the real world this would be the equivalent of a corporate dispute or state dispute that would shut off entire cities, states or countries because one business within it is problematic.

I think you are taking this too far. Twitch is a big but still a private platform. Basically it is the same age-old struggle between platform owners and copyright holders - the former claim that they aren't responsible for any content published on their platforms while the latter claim that they are.

Or it is being underestimated. It is probably wise with power grabs, whether corporate/oligarchy or authoritarian, to overestimate rather than underestimate.

Overestimating preserves ground gained, rights and freedoms and is an offensive. Underestimating cedes that and is a defensive position. Power grabs and authoritarianism cannot just be defense, while they are on offensive offense, you have to go on offense to get them on defense.

Underestimate overt and subtle power grabs with greater goals in mind and end up like this scene from Monty Python and The Holy Grail [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/aBvwOdi8UJA?t=35

> Would you approve of shutting it all down because someone is leeching?

Well, maybe I wouldn't. What about copyright holders and their exclusive licensees though? We know what their positions are on this particular issue.

>I don't approve of extorting all of Twitch for one companies corporate copyrights including blocking Twitch across an entire country. This is a scorched earth corporate authoritarian/oligopoly approach.

The alternative is that I can host whatever illegal content I want in a big site, knowing they won't have the balls to block it.

Then many countries in the EU are authoritarian too, since they block domain names of websites that link (yes, link, not host, just link) to streams of football matches.

No. The pot is always right; it is only the kettle that is black.

We are fully into the state/corporate/mafia extortion and authoritarian phase of the internet and technology.

And even Google is playing this game, cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800968

It's Rambler Rampage week! First, Nginx, now Twitch. By Friday I expect them to call a FSB raid on Yandex offices for taking their share of internet search market in early 00s.

This is the same company that threatens Igor Sysoev and Moscow NGINX office.

Once Is Chance, Twice is Coincidence, Third Time Is A Pattern

Looks like this may be a policy either at the oligopoly/oligarch, corporate or authoritarian state level.

I'd argue that twice is already a pattern.

Some people linked to it few years ago took over one of big businesses in Russia threatening it's owner and forcing him out of the country.

So it's 3, or at least 3.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euroset

They sent legal threats to my now-defunct MediaCrush project, too.

(Edit: the following was written as the post linked to some source which was Google Translated)

Reading to the end, the title is as on HN is wrong (edited and it doesn't include the last update). The last paragraph there is now:

"Updating publication # 3: According to TASS, Mikhail Gershkovich, sports project manager at Rambler Group, said: “At the moment, negotiations are ongoing with Twitch to sign a settlement agreement. The service gave us the tools to combat pirated broadcasts, and now we are only talking about compensation for damage caused from August to November 2019. "It turns out that the sum of the claims in the Rambler Group lawsuit was proposed by an external attorney in charge of the case. “The amount is technical and the maximum possible, it will be clarified,” concluded Gershkovich."

This link is giving me a ssl error on both Firefox and chrome on Android. Bad cert domain.

www.reuters.com ? It loads for me in both Firefox and Chrome on Android. The SSL labs report looks good, in particular it includes good trust chains for all browsers/operating systems. What IP does it resolve to for you? Is it possible you're being MITMed? What certificate is being presented to you?

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.reuters.c...

The link was changed it was pointing to a Google doc link of some kind.

Works fine on firefox desktop/safari ios.

Also untrusted on iOS resulting in an error.

Hey look, the same guys who went after nginx. This just tells me all those sanctions on Russian billionaires is working and they're looking for an avenue to strike back at the West.

Normally, companies would go after the users committing the copyright infringement, not the platform. This is just a money-grab. Similar to how they went after NGINX.

I wouldn't link this with nginx pursue. Rambler is very big company (something like Yahoo in Russian) and in this case claim looks reasonable. Off course amount looks shocking high, but as it was mentioned it's maximum possible and likely at the end it will be 1000 times smaller. It's kind of red marker for Twitch to react faster, nothing else.

Rambler is an intellectual-property remnant of a big internet company. A troll.

So, something like Yahoo?

NGINX is valued more than Rambler, what kind of company's size are you talking about?

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